However, that global reach makes it necessary to consider local cultures when developing and conducting training. If you deliver training to global audiences, here are a few things to consider when designing and delivering your training.

Use Global English

Not only is translation not necessarily the answer to conducting training overseas, it might not be necessary or even practical, especially if you need to conduct training in multiple countries that speak multiple languages. The solution is to use global english when developing and delivering training overseas. Essentially, global english is english, but free of complex language and local idioms that do not make sense in other countries.

For example, an American who is writing a training course should avoid the phrase “raining cats and dogs,” as this phrase does not makes sense in other cultures. Instead, the writer would simply say, “it rained hard,” or use a similar phrase describing how hard and steady it was raining.

In Some Cultures, the Trainer is the Expert

In the United States, for the most part, a best practice of training facilitation is that the trainer should be more of a facilitator of learning than “the” expert in the room. In fact, a major assumption of adult learning theory is that adult learners have experience and want to share that experience. However, in some cultures, the trainer is expected to be the expert who has the answers and provides them.

For example, in American culture, a talented facilitator will ask the group if they know the answer to a question or will ask the group what they would like the contribute. Learners in some cultures will not feel comfortable speaking up like that, expecting the trainer to provide the answer. This also applies to calling on people directly. In the United States, it is common practice to call on people (one reason for name tents, right?). This may not be accepted practice in some cultures.

Develop a Good Foundation, But Allow Localization

A great example of this is a brief story in which an e-learning course on driving principles described that the center lane was the safest lane to use on a multi-lane highway. However, this is not the case in Dubai, where drivers use the center lane exclusively for passing. The fundamentals of the course may have applied to any culture, but some specifics like which lane to use, could be swapped out for local customs, laws, and driving habits. The more specific a suggested action or example, the more likely it is a candidate for being localized.

Awareness is Key

This is certainly not an exhaustive list. However, the point is that when conducting training overseas, trainers should pay close attention to localizing the content and delivery of training, in order to maximize its success.

What experiences have you had with training overseas? We’d love to hear your stories of successes and lessons learned. Share your stories in the comments below.

Bill Cushard, author, blogger, and learning experience (LX) designer, is a human performance technologist (HPT) with extensive, in-the-trenches experience building learning organizations in start-up and hyper-growth organizations like E*TRADE, the Knowland Group, and Allonhill. You can follow him on Twitter or on Google+.

Yammer is an enterprise social network used by the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies to improve team collaboration, empower and engage employees, and overall just connect different parts of companies together. Because of its rapid growth, Yammer needed to think differently about how to develop and deliver training. The following challenges needed to be overcome.

Challenges

On-boarding New Employees: Yammer was hiring a lot of people to support its growth, primarily in frequent, small groups. Live classroom training was not always possible, so Yammer needed to find an alternative delivering platform.

On-boarding New Customers: In order to ensure its customers were successful, Yammer wanted to help them learn how to get the most out of Yammer. It needed a solution to quickly develop and deliver training to its customers who were all over the world.

Global Reach: Speaking of all over the world, Yammer needed to training employees and customers who were located globally, whether in one of their offices or out in the field.

Fast Moving Business – Yammer has product releases on a weekly basis, so the learning team needed a solution so they could develop content fast enough to keep up with the speed of these releases. Keeping employees and customers current on new product features was critical.

What Yammer Found

Ease of Use: One of the things Yammer was looking for in an e-learning authoring tool was ease of use. If Yammer’s learning team was going to keep up with the fast pace of hiring, customer growth, and product releases, they needed an authoring tool that was easy to use. They found Mindflash to suit this need. When compared to other e-learning authoring tools, Yammer found that when a new trainer joined the team, the new trainer learned Mindflash very quickly and was able to develop course very fast. In fact, Mindflash has stats that show that 63% of new Mindflash customers publish a course within one day of signing up. That is a testament to how easy Mindflash is to use.

Ease of Maintenance: As fast as Yammer releases product changes, maintaining existing training content is critical. Sound familiar? Yammer found that editing existing training content by removing slides, changing slide orders, editing existing content, and then publishing the changes was fast and easy. This allows the learning team to keep up with the speed of product releases.

Blended and Social Learning: Because Yammer is an enterprise social network, they are inherently social and wanted to deliver training that took advantage of a blend of formal, self-paced learning and social learning. Yammer found that by using Mindflash in combination with the Yammer platform, they could deliver a formal training course, have people pause in the middle of a course to participate in discussions, activities, and exercises in Yammer, and then resume the e-learning course that was developed in Mindflash.

The Results

The results demonstrate the power of using Mindflash and Yammer together to develop and deliver training. For example, Yammer now supports training for all of its employees and over 1,000 customers with four global certification programs. Yammer also transformed existing PowerPoint training content to blended learning experiences that can be used to train people no matter where they are in the world. Finally, the Yammer learning team continues to receive rave reviews from participants and from new trainers who join the team who absolutely love using Mindflash and Yammer to develop and deliver training.

If Yammer’s story resonated with you, I recommend you watch this webinar. You will learn how Yammer uses Mindflash, and you will learn tons of valuable tips and tricks for using Mindflash and the Yammer platform together.  After you watch the webiner, sign up for a free trial of Mindflash to see if you agree with Yammer that Mindflash can help you improve the speed and quality of your training.

If you are using Mindflash and Yammer in your organization, tell us how you are using it. We’d live to hear your stories in the comments below.

Bill Cushard, author, blogger, and learning experience (LX) designer, is a human performance technologist (HPT) with extensive, in-the-trenches experience building learning organizations in start-up and hyper-growth organizations like E*TRADE, the Knowland Group, and Allonhill. You can follow him on Twitter or on Google+.

Most learning professionals agree that the critical weakness of their learning management system (LMS) is reporting. In fact, a related study by Bersin & Associates determined that reporting is the number one challenge for legacy LMSs, and that nearly half of all learning professionals see it as a significant problem. 

In a study conducted by Training Industry, Inc., and Expertus, 84 percent of respondents were dissatisfied with their LMS reporting…the biggest reporting issue cited was limited or difficult access to information needed to support their business planning and strategy. 

Well doesn’t that just sum it up nicely. 

Yes, it is certainly true that reporting is only as good as the data you put into it. However, the biggest complaint about LMS reporting and analytics seems to be accessibility, not the data itself. So if you are in the process of selecting an LMS, you should consider at least these four functions of reporting before you make your decision.

Command Center: According to the ASTD article referenced above, the biggest [LMS] reporting issue cited was limited or difficult access to information. This problem can be solved using a dashboard or command center approach. As an LMS administrator, you should be able to go to a dashboard page that shows you graphical summaries of training activity, so that you can quickly check progress. If you have just launched a company-wide training course, it is nice to see a status bar or pie chart showing overall completion rates so you can follow progress in one click. Seriously, it should be that easy.

Of course you want to drill down into more detail, and that is where course-level reporting comes in.

Course-Level Reporting: From the dashboard, you should be able to click into any course to view the list of people who have and have not completed that course. I always like to run a “Not Taken” report that only shows people who have not completed a course. This is especially important for required and compliance training. By filtering the list to show only those people who have not completed a course, you can focus on following up with only those people.

The point is that reporting on who has and has not completed a training course should be as easy as clicking on the name of a course and viewing the list.

Trainee-Level Reporting: In some cases, a learning manager needs to answer the question, “How is Jimmy doing?” This is important functionality because it allows an LMS administrator and/or a team manager to follow the progress of any individual on their team. All you should have to do is search for a name on the reporting page in your LMS to pull up an individual and view everything that person has and has not completed.

Series-Level Reporting: More and more, learning professionals are breaking up e-learning courses into smaller chunks and grouping them in a series of courses to make up a more comprehensive and digestible program. If this is the case for you, then you certainly do not want to run separate reports for each individual course to see how people are doing. You want to run a report on the entire series to view the progress of your audience. Let’s face it, in the real world people get busy, sick, or just plain forget to complete a class in a series. It is nice to be able to know exactly where everyone stands by running a simple report on an entire series of classes.

Get a DEMO – Better Yet, Get A Free Trial: You wouldn’t buy a car before you test drive it, so why would you buy any enterprise software without trying it first. It is one thing to see a DEMO from a sales rep, who shows you the best of what the software can do in a well-rehersed, scripted demo. It is another thing altogether to run a report yourself in the tool. Technology is advancing so as to make free trials a standard in the software business. So try before you buy. During your free trial, get a feel for how easy it is to get the data you need by running a few reports and showing them to managers.

Trust me. This will save you many severe headaches.

Reporting is always a challenge because until you start getting requests from managers, you will not always know what type of reporting you will need until you need it. However, by considering the typical reporting needs mentioned above during the LMS buying process, you can at least be ready for the most common reporting needs.

We have recently improved our reporting capabilities to make it easier for you to get the information you need about learning performance in your organization. Check out the updated Mindflash analytics features to see how easy reporting in an LMS can be.

Bill Cushard, author, blogger, and learning experience (LX) designer, is a human performance technologist (HPT) with extensive, in-the-trenches experience building learning organizations in start-up and hyper-growth organizations like E*TRADE, the Knowland Group, and Allonhill. You can follow him on Twitter or on Google+.

It is a compelling way to take a course, and you can imagine that you get out of it what you put into it. Recently, I have been thinking about the practical implications for massive open on-line courses (MOOCs), and how they can be designed for the corporate environment.

Design Considerations

There are six considerations that learning designers should keep in mind when designing a MOOC in their organization.

Audience, Topic and Content: If everyone in your audience is located on the same floor of your building, you probably don’t need a MOOC. However, let’s say you have 75 line managers located in three different call centers all over the country and they all need to complete your management development program. Certainly one challenge is whether to send your trainers to each site over and over to teach classes, fly all managers to the same location for training, or do the entire program on-line. A MOOC could work well in this case because all of the managers can participate from any office (or at home for that matter).

Spaced Over Time: MOOCs are ideally suited to take advantage of the spacing effect whereby topics can be covered repeatedly over time to increase retention. A three day management seminar has the exact opposite effect (and is way more expensive, by the way).

Individual versus Team Work: Activities can be designed for both individual and team work. If the topic of the course is how to run an effective meeting, an example individual assignment could be to create an agenda using the course template. An example of a team assignment could be to running a team meeting using the template and invite members of your course team to the meeting. The members of your course team will evaluate your performance, provide you feedback, and you will turn in a summary of the feedback you received and what you will change for your next meeting.

Focus on Performance: Assignments can be structured so that participants have to apply what was learned that week. For example, an assignment could be to use the agenda template to run your next team meeting. See example above.

Structure of Each Week: Each week could be designed with a similar structure which will include a lecture, reading,  discussion(s), assignment, and/or peer feedback of previous week’s assignments. The lecture could be in the form of completed a Mindflash course on the topic. The reading could be to read an article from Fast Company or Harvard Business Review. The discussion would be a threaded discussion on an enterprise social network, like Yammer. The assignment could be a written assignment or a work project. There are endless ways in which each week could be structures, but you need to get the content out there, discussion on it, and some demonstration that work can be done based on what was learned.

Platform: In order to execute this structure, you are going to need a platform. The Mindflash / Yammer integration is a perfect combination for facilitating the design elements above. Mindflash content can be used for the lecture portion of the course, and Yammer can be used for discussions and for submitting assignments. When the entire course is complete, Mindflash can even produce a certification of completion for each participant.

What potential for MOOCs do you see in your organization? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Bill Cushard, author, blogger, and learning experience (LX) designer, is a human performance technologist (HPT) with extensive, in-the-trenches experience building learning organizations in start-up and hyper-growth organizations like E*TRADE, the Knowland Group, and Allonhill. You can follow him on Twitter or on Google+.

Mindflash has recently updated and released a more robust Series feature. We have found that many programs including new employee training, sales training, and continuing education certifications rely heavily on Series. Because of Series’ popularity we decided we wanted to improve and enhance this feature. We spent months researching what pain points Trainers experience and have come up with a solution to reduce the amount of time required to manage their courses and Trainees. This update to Series has been the farthest reaching yet, and we are excited to tell you about how these new features can help you save time as well as provide insight into what we are working on in the near future.

The Manage Tab

The first big change you will see when you visit your Series is the new interface. With the same tab structure as courses, you can easily navigate your way through creating and inviting people to your Series. The Manage Tab allows you to assign a Trainer and title to your Series, as well as choose which courses will be in the Series. This will allow the Trainees you invite to take any or all courses in the Series in the order they want. If you need Trainees to take the courses in a particular order, just check the “Enforce course sequence” box.

The Trainees Tab

The Trainee tab now includes major enhancements to Series. From this tab you will be able to see how each Trainee is progressing through the courses in the Series. You will also have the ability to drop them from the course if they were invited by accident or remind them to finish the Series if they are lagging behind. As they complete each course their expandable record will reflect their current status, until completion of the Series. Once you expand the Trainee record you can re-invite Trainees to individual courses. This lets you easily give Trainees another chance to take their course(s).

The Customize Tab

The Customize tab received the bulk of the newly added features. You now have the ability to set a passing requirement on the Series level, ensuring Trainees maintain a certain level of performance across all of their courses. Once they meet that requirement, the system can produce a Series level certificate which can override or go hand in hand with the individual course certificates. From the Customize tab you are also able to preview and add custom text to the Series Invitation, Reminder, and Completion emails. We have also added a Public Series page which allows Trainees to register themselves in the Series; the link to this page can be shared via email and/or Yammer, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The Public Series page is especially useful if you don’t want to manually invite Trainees into the system. You can include this link on your intranet, Yammer network or in the standard emails your group of Trainees receives.

The Track Tab

The last and perhaps most exciting addition to Series is the new Track tab. You are now able to see all Series course information on one page. You can get high level statistics about average scores, total number of Trainees in the Series and graphical views of progress through the courses. The Track tab also provides Trainee-level information including scores for each course. All of this data can be exported into Excel.

Latest Updates and Future Enhancements:

Over the next few months, Mindflash will continue to enhance Series with improvements and feature additions. Soon you will be able to add new Trainees directly from the Series interface. We are also planning on adding a Series Deadline feature that will allow you to set a deadline for the entire series instead of on a course-by-course basis.

As we continue to improve and enhance Series we would love to get your feedback. We value your opinion and want to make Mindflash as easy and useful to you and your training program as possible.

Note: Series and Advanced Reports are available in our Advanced and Pro plans.